Racism in America“BlacKkKlansman” suffers from Spike Lee’s heavy hand

SPIKE LEE’S “BlacKkKlansman” is set in the 1970s, but it is also the first major Hollywood film to comment explicitly on Donald Trump’s presidency. In an opening segment, Alec Baldwin—a regular Trump impersonator on “Saturday Night Live”—cameos as a pompous white supremacist. Later, a young David Duke (Topher Grace), the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, explains that the Klan will make headway not by wearing hoods and burning crosses, but by wearing suits and seeming respectable—and by “getting the embodiment of that in the White House”. And the film finishes with clips of the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Mr Trump’s defence of the “very fine people” in attendance. Whatever audiences think of “BlacKkKlansman”, no one could accuse it of being too subtle.

The film, declares an opening caption, “is based on some fo’ real fo’ real shit”, which is another way of saying that Mr Lee and his three co-writers adapted it from a memoir by Ron Stallworth, a black police detective who infiltrated the Klan. Mr Stallworth himself is played with swaggering self-assurance and a sizeable Afro by John David Washington, whose father, Denzel Washington, starred in Mr Lee’s “Malcolm X” biopic. The first African-American policeman in Colorado Springs, Stallworth is desperate to get out of the records department and into action, so when he spots a Klan recruiting ad in the local newspaper, he decides on a whim to dial the number at the bottom. He is soon friendly enough with the town’s Klansmen to be invited to meet them. Stallworth keeps the ruse going by persuading his sardonic Jewish partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), to take his place for face-to-face dealings with “the organisaton”.

Zimmerman’s involvement dilutes the film’s stranger-than-fiction black-guy-joins-the-Klan premise, as well as raising a pesky question: if Zimmerman is meeting the Klansmen in person, wouldn’t it be simpler if he, rather than Stallworth, talked to them on the phone, too? But Mr Lee doesn’t seem interested in the details of his improbable true story. With its jumbled plotting and thin characterisation, “BlacKkKlansman” resembles a farcical, feel-good episode of a 1970s cop show in which some amiable police officers outwit some stupid rednecks. The film is always entertaining and energetic, but it’s too slapdash to be the pulverising satirical thriller it might have been. And because Colorado Springs’ Klan chapter is presented as a handful of pathetic bunglers, it’s hard to say what exactly the undercover operation achieves.

The problem, shared by several of Mr Lee’s impassioned, intelligent but scattershot films, is that the director keeps getting distracted from the narrative by his favourite themes and preoccupations. Instead of concentrating on the characters and what they’re doing, he puts in regular wisecracks about the Trump administration and regular speeches about the onscreen representation of ethnic minorities. Stallworth is given an activist girlfriend (Laura Harrier) who doesn’t know that he is a policeman, but Mr Lee reduces their tricky relationship to a forum to debate blaxploitation films. Elsewhere, “Tarzan”, “Gone With The Wind” and D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” are analysed—none of which has much to do with Stallworth and Zimmerman’s daring adventures. Perhaps “BlacKkKlansman” would have been more focused if it had been directed by its producer, Jordan Peele, who intertwined a tense story and a sharp-edged race-relations message so expertly in “Get Out”, his directorial debut.

Still, there are moments when the plot and the politics combine with explosive results. In one joyous scene, David Duke, on the phone to Stallworth, boasts about his unfailing ability to divine a person’s race from their syntax and vocabulary. And in another sequence, a Klansman’s frumpy wife discusses a plan to bomb a civil-rights rally in the elated but nervous tones of a woman who has just had her long-awaited pregnancy confirmed. After years of aspiring to murder black people, she coos, “now it’s finally happening.”

These scenes are so potent that the viewer may wish that Mr Lee had cut out the cultural-studies seminars and the Trump references. The fo’ real, fo’ real shit would have been compelling enough without them.

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